Monthly Archives: March 2018

Next week is the 50th anniversary of the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

One of the things that I think that has been neglected over the years is how Coretta Scott King and her four children were impacted by his death. I am currently working on an editorial on this topic and I am hoping that the London Free Press -or someone else- will run it.

In the meantime, I recommend watching this segment from 60 Minutes (11:37-24:52). Just before Christmas 1968, Mike Wallace went to the King household to see how they were faring.

Last Friday I visited the Amherstburg Freedom Museum dedicated to the Underground Railroad and the history of the black communities of Essex County.

I highly recommend making the trip if you can. In addition to a preserved cabin built by a freeman in the 1850s, the museum site also has an African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church built in 1848 and which served as a terminus of the Underground Railroad. The museum features an art gallery and exhibit complete with artifacts and narratives of the Railroad, the slave trade and the connection between Ontario and Canada and the institution of slavery. https://amherstburgfreedom.org

Powerful observations and analysis. I, for one, worry about biodiversity loss and think the metaphor of a “burning library of life” is a powerful, poignant and pithy description of what we are witnessing and countenancing.

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d, I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition, They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things, Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

In the early 1970s, animal-inclined philosophers coined the term “speciesism” to describe the practice of regarding different species as having unequal moral value — with humans, of course, being most valuable of all. The word caught on, at least among people inclined to care about that sort…

I am delighted to report that The Black Lion Journal will be publishing 3 of my poems in their next collection. The pieces, “Jeremiah’s Jeremiad,” “Tribunes” and “American promises” are all poems I wrote to address the current “American moment.” I am honoured that they will be featured and will post the link when they appear.